Weather Facts for Kids
Wild facts about weather
Despite looking thick and solid, clouds are mostly empty space. The water droplets inside a cloud are so tiny — about one hundredth of a millimeter — and spread so far apart that you could walk through a cloud without getting very wet.
The Great Blizzard of 1888 dumped up to 50 inches of snow on the northeastern United States, burying New York City under drifts up to 40 feet tall. The storm killed more than 400 people and led directly to the construction of the New York City subway system, so that people could travel underground in bad weather.
El Niño is a climate pattern in which unusually warm water spreads across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. It disrupts weather around the entire globe, causing droughts in some regions, floods in others, and even changing the number of Atlantic hurricanes that form.
The thickest fog can reduce visibility to almost zero, meaning you cannot see farther than a few feet in front of you. Dense fog advisories are issued when visibility drops below a quarter mile, creating dangerous conditions for drivers and aircraft.
In many places, what falls as rain actually starts out as snow high in the clouds. The snowflakes melt as they fall through warmer air near the ground and arrive at the surface as raindrops. In winter, if the air near the ground stays below freezing, you get snow or sleet instead.
Hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones are all the same type of storm — a tropical cyclone — just called different names in different parts of the world. They are called hurricanes in the Atlantic, typhoons in the Pacific, and cyclones in the Indian Ocean.
Sleet and freezing rain look similar but form differently. Sleet freezes into small ice pellets before hitting the ground, while freezing rain arrives as liquid and then freezes on contact with cold surfaces, forming a dangerous glaze of ice on roads and trees.
Cumulonimbus clouds — the giant thunderstorm clouds — are the tallest clouds in the world. They can tower up to 75,000 feet (about 14 miles) into the atmosphere, punching through the upper troposphere and into the stratosphere with their anvil-shaped tops.
It is possible for snow to fall even when surface temperatures are slightly above freezing. This happens when the air above the ground is cold enough to keep snowflakes frozen until they are very close to landing, and the low humidity of the ground-level air does not melt them fast enough.
Dust storms from the Sahara Desert can carry fine sand particles all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean and the Americas. This Saharan dust actually fertilizes the Amazon rainforest with minerals, helping plants grow thousands of miles from where the dust originated.